Why Assume That Humans Are The Only Religious Species?

Sometimes some silly atheists go blathering on in a silly Rousseauean vein about "Nature"'s "purity," and how an example of this is that humans are the only species so "depraved" (Can you tell that I really, really hate Rousseau? You can? Good!) as to have something like religion.

Ridiculous. How on Earth do we supposedly know that no other species have religious beliefs? We know nothing of the sort. The absurd assumption that other species lack emotions similar to ours seems finally to be losing currency among zoologists. Let's toss out this assumption about their lacking religious beliefs, too, until we have some reason to assume such a thing.

Don't forget: evolution continues. Even if humans once were the only species with religious beliefs -- that's a tremendously huge "if," but let's assume it for a moment just for the sake of argument -- for tens of thousands of years, humans have both been religious and had close contact with domesticated animal species. Tens of thousands of years in which they've been watching us closely.

I repeat: the assumption that other species have no religious beliefs is absurd, premature, unfounded.

If you're agreeing with me, and about to shout: "Yes! And Exhibit A are the so-called 'elephants' graveyards'!", No. What you may have heard about elephants' graveyards is mostly myth. The most likely explanation for these collections of elephants' skeletons is that they were dumped there by poachers after they killed the elephants and took their tusks.

I have no Exhibit A which is going to make people exclaim and slap their foreheads and insist that animals are religious. I, in fact, am not insisting that animals are religious. I am merely asserting that we have no reason to rule it out, and pointing out how many times already we have realized that certain assumptions about our non-relatedness to other species were incorrect.

Similarities Between Cats, Dogs And Humans

CAUTION! THIS POST CONTAINS CUTE PICTURES OF ANIMALS, INCLUDING SOME YOU MAY HAVE SEEN BEFORE ON THIS BLOG! I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LIKE A COUPLE OF THESE PICTURES! I MAY USE THEM AGAIN IN FUTURE POSTS! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!

We and cats and dogs share the majority of our DNA. We all yawn and stretch. We all sneeze. We all do this --

-- when we're confused and/or intrigued. We all occasionally want to can haz cheezburgr. We all like to snuggle:

We all scratch ourselves when we itch, and we all get wide-eyed when we're startled.

It's not just we who can learn from other species. To give just one example of them learning from us: every single one of those totally-adorable "unusual animal buddies" stories, in which animals from 2 or more different species form a close relationship --

-- and by the way, can we agree that there's actually nothing unusual about it any more? -- every one of those sweet friendships between a cat and a duck or a seal and a penguin or a dog and a deer or what have you -- every one of those relationships has happened when all of the animals involved were under the care and protection of humans. [PS, 22. February 2016: That's not true. Since posting this I have learned of animals "in the wild," as it's sometimes called, who have adopted abandoned infants of other species. Including a lioness raising an orphaned baby antelope, protecting it form other lions and giving it milk.]

When I'm urging people to appreciate animals more deeply, I am most definitely including humans among those animals. Not every single interaction between humans and other animal species harms the others, that's every bit as obviously untrue as saying that other species don't have emotions or memories. The belief in the supposed wonderful quality of things "untouched by man" is just the irrational flip side of the more traditional irrational belief that humans are the "pinnacle of creation." Both rest upon an assumption that there is a fundamental difference between humans and other species, that the others are "natural" while we humans are "artificial." Nonsense. We're a part of nature. I urge you to ponder that the next time you look into the eyes of a dog or cat or some other friendly non-human creature which has eyes.

Human Exceptionalism Is An Outmoded Religious Concept

It's not unusual these days to hear someone say in the same breath both that humans are distinct from the rest of the "animal kingdom," and that we must keep in mind that we are part of the continuum of life on Earth, two statements which directly contradict each other. The fact that it's not unusual, that even respected academics can still say such things without immediately being shouted down or risking their tenure, demonstrates that we are in a period of transition from religion to science. As recently as Charles Darwin's lifetime, the assertion that humans are no more or less than animals, although it was no longer particularly eyebrow-raising within biology departments, could still encounter great resistance in general in even the most progressive universities, because even then most of them were still dominated by religion. Very few universities founded more than two centuries ago were founded as other than religious institutions, and very many since have been founded as religious institutions, whose very purposes for being are based on holy texts which are thousands of years old, not on insights gained more recently which conflict with what those texts say. And, of course, universities which have been explicitly, declaredly secular cannot be expected to have been entirely immune from religious mindsets and agendas which permeate our very existence. And the notion that humans are distinct from the rest of nature is a religious notion, not shared by all religions by any means, but a central tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which teach that God put man in charge of everything and that man has a soul which is lacking in other species.

This human exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in people's minds. But biology says something completely different. It has shown us that we are not different from other animals. We're all carbon-based and we all grow and function on the basis of DNA, and humans share the majority of their DNA coding with, for example, cats. We're the same.

It's also only religiously-based thinking which causes anyone to find such plain facts insulting and/or to reject them. The religious concept of humanity being "higher" than all other life forms causes a remarkably one-sided assessment of human accomplishments when making comparisons between species. Yes, there are a long list of wonderful things which are unique on Earth to our species, the information technology by means of which you and I are now communicating being just one example. But there are also a long list of horrible things which only we humans have accomplished. No other species has produced smog or acid rain. (Not yet, anyway. We mustn't forget that all species are continually evolving, not just us.) And besides thoroughly tangible things like computers and pollution, there are assumptions made about things we don't know, such as what other species are thinking. (It's iffy enough when we claim to know something about the internal lives of other members of our own species.) Even among biologists who are atheists the assumption than no non-human species think at all, based on nothing at all but the vestiges of religious human exceptionalism, is still amazingly widespread. How do we know that dogs don't think in ways very similar to us? How do we know, for example, that they have no religious beliefs? The only rational answer is that we don't know, that such assumptions rest on primitive human mental habits and upon no firm evidence. And that we should stop making such assumptions and approach such subjects with more open minds.

Habits of thinking develop not just in individuals but also in groups, and this habit of regarding humans to be exceptional and apart from the rest of life -- again, I must emphasize, NOT shared by all humans, although it has been dominant in Western and Islamic civilizations -- this mental habit has been engrained and reinforced for thousands of years, and so perhaps it's not at all to be expected that it will vanish quickly. But we can start by recognizing where it came from, and that it has not come from science.

I don't think that there should be anything at all insulting or otherwise disappointing in seeing ourselves as animals like other animals. If adapting this attitude is a negative thing for you, perhaps you don't know non-human species as well as you could and don't love them nearly as much as you could.

Someone Asked Whether Religion Was Bad For Animals

The answer is obviously yes: we're animals and religion is bad for us. It's also unfortunate that some religions teach that humans are fundamentally different from other life forms. I'm not an expert on Native American cultures, but I gather that some of them regard humans as just one part of life, no more important than other parts, an insight which Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian culture has resisted with much tenacity. And for all I know there many be many other human cultures in other parts of the world which lack these strange ideas about humans being unique, and about "nature" as something separate from humans. It amazes me to see how many biologists, although they've managed to shake the primitive belief in a deity or deities, still hang on to primitive ideas of human exceptionalism, insisting that humans are unique and separate from the rest of life, in the face of ever-mounting evidence that we are not. It's as if they haven't fully grasped the fact that all life forms are continuing to evolve, and that a paltry few million years ago our ancestors were creatures which human exceptionalists would not recognize as human, and that there's no reason to think that in a paltry few million years the descendants of dogs or cats won't be able to read or build computers or do other things which supposedly are "uniquely human." (What, you think dogs and cats aren't paying attention to us?) Not to mention assuming things such as that other species here and now have no human-like emotions, or that we actually comprehend their sophistication in other fundamental ways and are therefore qualified to compare them (disparagingly) with ourselves. Heraclitus and Nietzsche only got this one half right when they pointed out the similarity between apes and humans and said that people don't want to see the obvious similarities because apes are ugly and the similarity is insulting to us: some of the similarities between us and apes are insulting to the apes.